Improving the Programs & Events Dashboard user experience

Improving the Programs & Events Dashboard user experience

We’ve been fortunate this summer to have Google Summer of Code intern Sejal Khatri working on a broad spectrum of improvements to the Dashboard user experience. Earlier this year, Sejal completed an Outreachy internship, during which she created the entire user profiles feature. This time, she’s got a more ambitious agenda: to improve the user experience as much as possible! She’s been doing everything from user testing, to documenting and prioritizing usability issues, to fixing user interface bugs and problems, to a major refresh of the Dashboard’s mobile support.

Sejal’s main focus for user testing has been to learn about the needs and frustrations of Programs & Events Dashboard users across the world. Many of the things we had in mind when developing the Wiki Education Dashboard don’t line up perfectly with the global Wikipedia Education Program, Art + Feminism, Wikimedia chapters’ edit-a-thon series, and other use cases for the global version of the Dashboard. Following up on half a dozen user tests, she’s fixed several high priority issues and documented ideas for addressing more.

One of the problems we’ve had on our radar for a while now is the how the Dashboard looks on mobile devices. The intial design was flexible enough to work well on phones. But as the features have grown and evolved, it’s gotten less and less usable; the nav bar is over-crowded, some newer features don’t look right on small screens, and it’s generally not fun to use. For the last stretch of her internship, Sejal is working mobile styling refresh.

You can see more from Sejal on her blog, where she’s been chronicling her work.